[ddingus]

I miss my Note 4.

Had lots of sensors, plastic enclosure, removable battery... Great phone, very robust, fast, did not need to be handled delicately.

Then they made the enclosures glass. Now I have to handle a phone delicately and with considerable care. It's slippery! Wants to slide and hit the floor!

Next move?

Get rid of the headphone jack!

After that?

No SD card.

After that?

No removable SIM.

Now, it folds?

None of this makes my life better. None of it improves the robustness and utility of the device.

I bet the first company to make a robust, plastic case phone with all the good features put back into the product will do well.

People want the utility and robustness.

[mimsee]

There's Samsung Xcover Pro. Plastic back, 3.5 headphone jack, SD card, removable battery, dual sim.

[brokenmachine]

I mean, 4Gb ram and IPS screen.

Why can't I pay more and get a flagship with everything? You pay more and get more features missing.

All they sell is flagshits.

[brokenmachine]

Also rounded screens.

Just makes the edges distorted and the screen much easier to scratch.

[ddingus]

Yes, though I must say I got used to the edges. Don't really notice.

Scratches and the difficulty of solid cases is made harder. Screen films tend to peel up and collect grime and dirt.

[brokenmachine]

I'm mostly used to it too, but it's still worse in every way than a flat screen. Why???

[ddingus]

Seems like it might just be a case of all the little downsides add right up without the curved edges adding anything to the experience.

We get left without very many options to work differently despite the screen actually working differently!

That might not read well, but I did give this some thought. It's an interesting question to me personally.

Say we have two experiences, a dial telephone and one with the little buttons. And then someone comes up with a dial that does the tones instead of the pulses. And this actually happened! Button phones ended up with a set of buttons arranged like a dial!

They sucked and I think the dynamics are similar:

In the case of the phone input schemes, dials were seen as slow and limited to numeric input. Nothing prevented a dial with more holes in it, other than being able to put fingers in the holes, but the design seemed optimal with just the numbers.

One of the real negatives about the dial was each unique digit of input varied in both the time required for a user to perform the input as well as that time being different per unique digit input needed. It's laborious. And it's all driven by the pulsing.

Buttons were a lot nicer! Each input took roughly the same time. DTMF tones are fast, as is the mechanical operation of the button. And one gets a nice benefit for repeat digits! Finger is already in position, making it a no brainer to work the button twice. It's not laborious to anywhere near the degree a dial was. It's driven by the DTMF tones.

One could look at these two cases and see that it's really about the tones vs the pulses, and from that insight a move to a dial shaped arrangement of buttons might be the best thing ever! What gets missed is many subtle things adding up to take potential gains off the table.

With the screens, Samsung made a big deal out of the edge of the screen being a new UX element that seems like a gain. One can flick from the side without much effort, and it can be fast, by way of one example.

But the negatives add right up!!

It's hard to grip the phone without triggering some actions. Disabling that stuff helps, but it's still a very smooth phone that wants to slip away and having less of a grip takes away from the confidence one gets with a non curved screen.

One thing I did was a get a beefy battery case for mine. It made the phone thicker and it put a ledge near those screen edges. I don't trigger mine in error much at all now. The phone feels substantial, I can grip it, and it's not slick, and, and, and...

BTW, you may really benefit from that battery back. I got the Mophie one. It's excellent, allows reasonable access to the pen, though worse than without the case, just not that much worse. Battery life is extended and I can operate the phone in ways that do not wear the internal battery as much.

It turned out to have changed the balance. The upsides have value I can benefit from while marginalizing the many downsides.

And that is my take on this. Worth what you paid...